So much average

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

I loved Lionel Jeffries as an actor from when I was a young teenager. As CPO Sidney Kraut in Two Way Stretch he was nothing short of brilliant, stealing every scene from no less than Peter Sellers, Quite simply, he was a talent of surprising versatility best known for comedy but also with a a portfolio of character roles.His directing career started off like that of Orson Welles.... The Railway Children is simply in a class of its own, an outstanding film that appeals to the whole family but without patronising in any way.The Amazing Mister Blunden was not as good but it's still worth a look.So how the blazes did he end up directing dross like this? Did he need the money? I would like to think that, beyond directing the film, he didn't play much of a part in the production. The original idea, the (dreadful) script, the pitching of it to the investors.... please tell me it was all done by somebody else. Because this film is a crock. And just look at the cast. James Mason, Billie Whitelaw, Bernard Cribbins and the voices that you never get to see are pretty much a Who's Who of British acting talent of the time. Quite extraordinary.Anyway, to the film. I really didn't like the child actor in the lead role. He's an ugly little brat with too much hair and a nasty voice. And he's in every scene for the whole 105 minutes (and, believe me, it seems a lot longer). And, much as I admire James Mason and Bernard Cribbins neither of them are going to be pointing at this as a piece of work that they are proud of. The animation is poor, and the less said about the quality of the musical score the better for everybody.All in all, it's pretty damn poor, and a blot on the CV of the great Lionel Jeffries.

When you start fast-forwarding, you know it's bad.I picked this movie off of Netflix expecting it to be a pleasant children's cartoon. Thankfully I have learned to pre-screen things, because this movie was absolutely terrible.Human misery, death, and suffering are not my idea of a children's story. This movie basically starts with a homeless woman begging for money for her newborn baby so they won't starve. We are then shown people stealing, beating each other, cheating, and human excrement being poured over food--all before we meet the men who are abusing our hero, Tom.All of this, meanwhile, is live-action. You have to sit through about twenty minutes of this awful display of inhumanity before you finally get to the cartoons you thought you were getting when you started, and then there's another 20 minutes of live action at the end, making for half the movie. I don't know about your kids, but when my kids want a cartoon, they want a cartoon. Not a bunch of folks wandering around London getting typhoid.The live-action plot then drags on and on with more of the cruelty. Finally Tom jumps in a lake and is--for no reason ever explained in the movie--transformed into an animated "water baby." I suppose that's a bit nicer than saying "Hey kids, he committed suicide and drowned." He makes some friends, sings some songs, encounters some random enemies, and finally finds the other water babies. This is the good part of the movie. But then the other water babies are randomly kidnapped, and Tom must go on a quest to save them.Tom then returns to the human world, where he is again abused and you wonder why he doesn't just kick someone in the groin already and run off. Finally he does stand up for himself, the bad guys are arrested and he achieves a Dickensian happy ending, which honestly I never did quite manage to understand (did rich people just adopt random street urchins?) and we learn that several creepy ladies who've been appearing randomly throughout the film are actually the same person, which doesn't actually add anything to the plot or make any sense.As a parent, I have seen plenty of bad children's shows. Heck, I've endured Barney the Purple Dinosaur. But this movie takes the cake. Yes, Victorian England was a terrible place in which children were abused and death might seem like a reasonable escape. This does not make it 'entertaining', for me or my children.

Classic author C.S. Lewis once wrote an essay stating that no children's story is worth the reading, viewing etcetera if it can only be enjoyed by children. I'd say this film is an easy one to hold up as a defence of his argument.Around the age of five or six, I loved it, tracked it down only three or four years later and found it to be wet, poorly animated, dully and confusingly written, and with distressingly repetitive and awful songs (I'm looking t you, hi-cockalorum), showing a production aiming at joyful silliness and whimsy, but resulting with an ugly, twee, frustrating mess.By all means, show this to your infant, but I would heartily recommend that you don't buy a copy or attempt to sit in on the viewing. If you want something set in the same era but with genuine charm and wit, go after 'Oliver Twist' or the BBC's brilliant adaptation of 'The Box of Delights'.

I was 12 when this film was released and adored it. The song's were inspiring and it made me feel good, watching it several time's at the cinema. I actually had the soundtrack album and played the song's over and over.26 years later...I'm ashamed. Just sat and watched it with my 2 daughters who enjoyed it lot's but my cynical older grown up eyes hated it. It's very poorly directed in many places and considering it was Lionel Jeffries directing I really wanted to enjoy it. The character animation was so rough yet the backgrounds were quite good. I remember the critics at the time saying that it was a poor film and was horrified but now I agree.It is an old film yes, compared to what can be achieved now, maybe that's why I thought it was good then. But that does not excuse it for it's poor acting, directing and sloppiness. The main child actor's voice seem's dubbed which is very distracting too. Can't quite see what they were trying achieve when it was being made, all that it become was a weak film.